MARA Fights Malaria With WaveMaker and Amazon Web Services

Critical Research Application Runs On WaveMaker Cloud Development Platform and Amazon EC2

San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) February 9, 2010

WaveMaker Software™, the open cloud development platform, today announced that MARA has deployed its malaria prevention application using WaveMaker and Amazon EC2. This application makes malaria research data available through a secure yet highly accessible web site (http://www.mara-database.org).

The Mapping Malaria Risk in Africa (MARA) initiative started in 1996 as a non-institutional group effort. This effort teamed a group of scientists across the African continent and in Europe, working co-operatively to generate and present malaria risk maps.

Since 2006, MARA has been maintained by the Swiss Tropical Institute (STI) in Basel, Switzerland. The project is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, in collaboration with the Medical Research Council (MRC) in Durban, South Africa.

MARA was implemented using the WaveMaker cloud development platform and the MySQL database and then deployed to Amazon EC2. The application and underlying database are available free of charge to registered researchers.

"WaveMaker and Amazon put a great deal of development and deployment power into the hands of a user," said Aurelio Di Pasquale, Lead Software Developer at MARA project. “WaveMaker is so easy to use we were able to build a complete web application with minimal learning curve and in less than half the time it would have taken with traditional web tools. Amazon EC2’s low cost and robust performance make it a great fit for hosting high-profile, non-profit web applications, and with WaveMaker's one-click cloud deployment, launching the application on Amazon EC2 was a breeze.”

"MARA is a great example of the WaveMaker community in action,” said Ed Callahan, Community Manager at WaveMaker. “With over 15,000 registered WaveMaker developers, we are starting to see the true potential of WaveMaker as a platform for democratizing web and cloud application development."

“We’re excited to see MARA and WaveMaker putting Amazon EC2 to use for this great cause,” said Steve Rabuchin, General Manager for Sales and Business Development, Amazon Web Services. “Amazon Web Services offers any developer or business the tools and technology to launch an application quickly and cost-effectively.”

Sub-Saharan Africa carries the highest per capita burden of disease in the world of which malaria is the single largest contributor. Of global deaths attributed to malaria 90% now occur in sub-Saharan Africa.

MARA was initiated to provide an Atlas of malaria for Africa, containing prevalence data to help determine how to allocate anti-malaria resources and constitutes an important global resource to help non-profit organizations to coordinate their malaria control activities.

In the absence of such data it is impossible to rationalize allocation of limited resources for malaria control. Detailed mapping of malaria risk has been done in Africa. However, an open-access real-time malariometric database was not available until recently.

About Wavemaker Software
WaveMaker Software™ is the only open source cloud development platform, with a 15,000-strong developer community and a leadership role in the Cloud Quick Start Program in partnership with IBM, Amazon and RightScale. WaveMaker makes it ridiculously easy to build, deploy and customize cloud applications with drag and drop development tools, one-click cloud deployment and end user self-service customization. WaveMaker customers like the Center For Disease Control, Macy's and KANA have built amazing-looking web applications with minimal learning curve and up to 98% less code. For more information, please visit http://www.wavemaker.com.

About Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides a suite of solutions that enable organizations to leverage Amazon.com's robust technology infrastructure and content via simple API calls. Using services such as Amazon EC2, Amazon S3 and Amazon SQS, organizations can cut fixed costs by letting Amazon do the "heavy lifting" of building and managing their infrastructure. Amazon Web Services helps organizations focus on their idea and develop web applications in a reliable, scalable and cost-effective manner. For more information, visit http://aws.amazon.com.

About MARA
MARA is a comprehensive collection of malaria time and space specific points prevalence data from Africa. MARA was started in 1996 as Pan-African initiative and ran in its first phase until 1999. Currently, MARA is being maintained by the Swiss Tropical Institute (STI) in Basel, Switzerland in collaboration with the Medical Research Council (MRC) in Durban, South Africa (Phase II). MARA's goal is to maintain an open-access and user friendly internet based platform to extract and display row data and disease burden estimates. To date over 13,000 data points have been collected from published and unpublished sources. This represents decades of malaria research in Africa, much of which was on the verge of being lost. Today, many major documents on malaria in Africa make use of MARA data. More information is available at http://www.mara-database.org.

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